The amount of information available on the Internet is rapidly increasing, especially in the era of web 2.0. Some estimates indicate that between the years 1996 and 2007, the fraction of the world's population that used the Internet grew from approximately 1% to approximately 22%. Irrespective of the actual percentages, trends suggest that the Internet will continue to grow. Research has confirmed, however, that there is only a small quantity of information of interest to most netizens.
Traditionally, information is transmitted in a one-to-one fashion, where a client requests the information of interest from a server. One-to-one transmission is not an efficient way to send the same information to multiple users. Moreover, the existing Internet infrastructure has poor robustness. Conventional solutions have proposed the idea of wirelessly broadcasting Internet data through a satellite or digital broadcasting system, but have not effectively addressed the issues associated with broadcasting data to a group of clients.